The European Union (EU) has long been
striving for improvement in the working condition in the shipbreaking yards in
Bangladesh and other South Asian countries. Besides, it is also trying to
enforce measures to address environmental concerns in the shipbreaking yards
of these countries, where scrapped ships are dismantled regularly.
To improve the working condition in the
South Asian shipbreaking yards, the European Parliament has accepted a
proposal to impose penalties on EU ship owners, who dispose of scrap vessels
for dismantling in the developing world.
The proposal, if approved, will help in the
cleaning up of old ships and ensure that the materials are recycled in
EU-approved facilities in line with the 'polluter pays' principle, says a
recent news release of the European Parliament.
If the step of the EU becomes successful,
the European shippers may have to pay 3.0 cent per tonne freighted into a
special fund once they dock at EU harbours.
In the case of a 100,000 tonne shipment
requiring a 3,000 euro fee, the amount will flow into the shipbreaking yards
in Southeast Asia. It is a kind of disposal tax, which is intended to improve
working condition and environmental standards.
With this system of making payments for the
special fund, the EU now wants to see European shipping companies take on more
responsibility for disposal of the vessels.
Currently, European shipping companies are
entitled to sell eight-year-old operational ships to the shipping companies in
non-EU countries, which after many years send those to the ship-breaking yards,
when the vessels become obsolete.
Under the current scheme, the cost for the
exercise is borne by the most recent owner, rather than the first one, the news
release said.
However, the European shipping firms are
yet to agree to share the cost for mitigating the hazards being faced during
ship scrapping.
But persuasion is continuing and the ship
owners are likely to comply, the news release added.
Most scrapped ships of the European
countries are dismantled in ship-breaking yards on the coastal lines of
Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, where working condition and environmental
safety measures are bleak.
The ship-breaking yard of Bangladesh has
become the world's largest ship scrapping yard over the last forty years, and
now it accommodates more than 100 scrap firms, which engage more than 150,000
workers along a patch of some seven-kilometre-long (4.3 miles) beach near the
country's main port city of Chittagong.
Around 40 per cent of the ocean going scrap
vessels and tankers of the world are dismantled at the ship-breaking yard of
Bangladesh each year.
However, Bangladesh remained the world's
second-largest ship-breaker after Pakistan, while India slid to the third
position in the 2012 calendar year, scrap-yard sources said.
Bangladesh dismantled about 260 ships
weighing a total of 3.1 million tones, nearly half the share of Pakistan that
tore down more than 500 ships with the dead-weight tonnage of 6.0 million
tonnes.
India, which was the largest ship breaker
of the world in 2010 and 2011, broke more than 160 ships weighing 1.9 million
tonnes in 2012, the industry officials said.
India overtook Bangladesh in the
ship-breaking sector in 2010 and 2011 due to imposition of a ban on the sector
by the Bangladesh High Court on the ground of environmental and workers' safety
concerns, according to officials at the Bangladesh Ship Breakers Association
(BSBA).
But according to officials at the BSBA, by
dismantling 260 ships, only 2.9 million tonnes of recyclable steel plates were
retrieved.
Bangladesh, which has no iron ore, solely
depends on the ship-breaking sector to feed its nearly 1,000 steel re-rolling
mills across the country.
Besides steel plates, different accessories
ranging from electrical appliances to sanitary and plumbing materials and
household items including furniture and utensils etc are made from the scrapped
ship materials.
Source: the financial express. 3 April 2013
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